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English at universities

Johnson: Not just studying English, but in English

May 7th 2014, 9:43by R.L.G. | BERLIN

THE world’s elite speaks English, so universities around the world are not only teaching English, but increasingly, teaching in English. A new report from the British Council and Oxford University’s department of education highlights the trend and unsurprisingly finds that English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is on the rise at all levels of education. But it is most pronounced at the post-secondary level.

Those who want to study in English (outside the English-speaking world) have many options. There are traditional foreign-founded universities like the American University in Cairo, as well as modern, local universities and colleges like the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia or ESMT, a business school in Berlin. A growing third option are the satellites of American universities, whether the University of Florida’s campus in Panama or New York University’s in Abu Dhabi.

Even traditional institutions are increasingly teaching in English, especially at the graduate level. Students are particularly keen on English in inherently global subjects, including science and business. It is possible to get a master’s degree or even a PhD in some subjects at, say, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark’s most prestigious institution, without knowing a lick of the language of Kierkegaard. (Undergraduate classes remain mostly in Danish.) In 2011 Sofie Carsten Nielsen, then an opposition member of parliament, argued that universities should do even their internal business in English, to encourage foreign scholars resident there to take a bigger role in the university.

But not everyone is keen on the idea. Ms Carsten Nielsen told Johnson in 2012 that she was surprised by a vociferous public push-back against her idea. (The populist-nationalist Danish People’s Party was particularly aghast.) Ms Carsten Nielsen became education minister in February—but when asked about her old pro-English stance, she retreated, saying “I think it is important to have a vision and start a debate about how we can survive global competition. But that suggestion isn’t a goal I’m going to be working on soon here.”

Outside Europe, the picture is mixed: English-medium education hasn’t gone far in Latin America. Anti-American Venezuela has explicitly anti-English-medium policies, according to the British Council/Oxford report, but interestingly, so does Israel, an American ally. Some South Asian universities, by contrast, are dominated by English. Modernising Arab countries like Qatar have pushed EMI heavily. China too has promoted university programs taught entirely in English. It has perhaps over-promoted them: many students have come from Africa or South Asia drawn by the promise of an English education, only to find they could not understand their teachers. But the quality of English in China is improving fast. Chinese scientists get big bonuses (and swell with pride) when their papers make into the best international—English-language—journals.

Geoff Pullum, writing at Lingua Franca, is right to say that this is all very lucky for English, which just happened to be on top of the global pile of languages when mass communications technology (and then cheap travel, mass tourism and the internet) came on the scene. Had all of this happened two hundred years ago, universities the world over would be rushing to offer master’s programmes in French. The success of English has nothing to do with it being particularly flexible, practical, easy, logical, or any of the other old stereotypical characteristics ascribed to it. English was just in the right place at the right time.

But there is a self-fulfilling prophecy at work, one that nationalist opponents of English have a fair point in highlighting. English is not especially suited to higher education by its inherent properties. But the more the world’s academics and students are reading and writing and researching in English, the richer English becomes with the vocabulary and style needed for academic work, as a matter of course. Other languages suffer the reverse problem: what linguists call “domain loss”, or a retreat from certain areas and survival in smaller circles, the home and the pub rather than the lecture hall. A financial incentive accelerates the process: universities that do not offer English programmes risk losing students.

A single language for global communication is a wonderful thing, particularly well suited to universal topics like mathematics. But it comes with a cost. That cost cannot be wished away, but needs a clear-eyed analysis from policy-makers at universities and in parliaments. To embrace English, as Denmark does, or to fight for the survival of the national language in academic life, as Israel does? The choice is not an easy one.